Well, on Saturday after my morning walk I brought in the scratching post my sister had given back to me. I didn't even get it into the living room before Apricot walked in, wanting to say hello and get petted. He stopped when he saw me carrying it, so I put it down to allow him to investigate it.
This is a new thing he's starting to learn: that when I do something new or bring something new into the house, I'll ask him if he wants to investigate it. Which means that it's safe to sniff around it and look into it. What's he's really learning is that this is how I say something is okay, and he's learning to trust my judgement about things.
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| The Bird has taken to roosting on top of the new scratching post. Apricot doesn't often jump up this high for it, though. |
Within thirty seconds he was sniffing the scratching post directly and within a minute he was sitting on it. Yes! It didn't scare him. It didn't even scare him when later it turned up in the living room because I moved it to its final location after I'd vacuumed.
Yeah, about that, the vacuuming. I forget if I said before how Pippin would race me back to the vacuum cleaner so he could pretend to be all indignant about me making this horrid noise around him, when I'd gone to all the trouble to move him to the previously cleaned end of the house. Last week when I carried Apricot to the other end of the house, he'd stayed. Well, technically he'd changed rooms so he could hide under the headboard, but he'd stayed in the clean end of the house.
So this Saturday I vacuumed half the house, changed the plug over, and then moved Apricot out of his cubbyhole and into the pink room again. (Hoping he'll get the point that the pink room is safe, and that he doesn't have to hide under the headboard ... so far no luck getting that point across, but hope springs eternal and all that.)
Anyway, does he stay where I put him? Does he go hide under the headboard? No! The silly cat races me back to the living room! I hastily started the cleaner (I got there before he did) which stopped him in his tracks in the hallway just before the living room. And there he stayed, watching, seeing if maybe he could get to his cubbyhole in the cat tree.
He finally decided I was getting too close with the vacuum cleaner and ran. I'm glad he ran before he saw the horrible things I do to the cat tree. I vacuum the base and then lift the cleaner up (and it's an upright, so that's the entire cleaner I'm lifting) to vacuum what bits I can of the tree platforms.
When I finished cleaning and put the vacuum cleaner away, I went into the bedroom to tell him it was safe and he could come out now. I started saying that as I rounded the corner of the bed, and he was out and up to me before I could even get to the headboard corner. I was so proud of him!
Later that day we were in the pink room on the floor, and he was walking around me, and I grabbed with an arm (not a hand) and managed to do it with just the wrong timing. Instead of pressing my arm against his chest/side, which would have been like petting and probably would have gotten me a puzzled look but nothing else, or getting his tail between my arm and body (which would have gotten me an exasperated, patient sigh--he's already starting to get the idea I have a thing about cat tails and you might as well put up with it); no, I catch him right before the hip bone.
Which he did not appreciate, and I didn't expect him to. He was behind me at the time and I couldn't see where I was in relation to him. He lashed out with a claws-out paw, mostly just a warning, but he managed to catch me in just the wrong spot on my finger and drew blood. I wasn't mad, or anything, but I did have to get up and go put a bandaid on the spot so I wouldn't get blood on stuff.
So the next day, I got him when he was all sleepy, and clipped his claws, since obviously there was a sharp one. And guess what--I managed to get all his claws, including the back ones! And in all eighteen claws, (five on each front paw and four on each back paw), there was only one sharp enough to have cut me. Seriously? What are the odds? (One out of eighteen. Yes, I know.)
I brought my sister-in-law over for a brief moment after supper before we headed to her house for board games, and although Apricot retreated to the bedroom, I was able to coax him out from under the headboard at least before we left. And it wasn't a run-for-the-hills flee, more like a strategic retreat. I'm trying to get him used to the idea there can be other humans in the house and that they are nice humans. So it's okay that he didn't come out to where she was in the living room. Simply not-hiding completely while he could hear someone else moving around in the house was enough for now.
(Apricot currently wants me to play bird with him and is pestering me in between being patient. He is pestering by threatening to jump onto my lap (which has the laptop on it, and causes me to move the laptop every time he pretends he's going to jump up) and also doing things he knows I don't like him to do, like pulling on the blanket on my feet or biting the edge of (yet another) carpet. As he is currently playing nicely with one of his toys, I shall go reward him for it by getting out Da Bird. Back in a while.)
Now that he's all tired out and flat on his side on the wooden floor that isn't covered by carpet (not an easy thing to find in this house), I can continue.
Oh but it's fun playing with him with the Bird. He has moods where he likes it to do different things. A while back it was racing around and around in circles in the living room (nice because I can stand in one spot and simply rotate). Lately it's been chasing it up and down the hallway (nice because I can stand in the doorway of the tv room and make the Bird go from one end of the hallway into the pink room at the other end). He doesn't like it to go out of sight, and if I'm getting bored with his stalking (which is slow and nothing much happens so I do get bored) I can simply take the Bird for a flight where it ends up around a corner, and poof, running Apricot.
But I digress. What I meant to tell about was what happened on Sunday, after the claw clipping but while he was still in his afternoon snooze time. (Unfortunately for me on the weekdays, this snooze time happens between noon and four-ish, so he's waking up right when I get home, and raring to go.)
I was reading, in my chair, and cold. The cold isn't because of the house, although in deference to the little person with the permanent fur coat I did change the temperature to be 77 instead of 78 (that's F not C). Being abnormally cold is just something I have to deal with as part of my chronic illnesses. (Yeah, that's plural. Let's not go there; it's boring.)
My sister-in-law gave me this lovely fuzzy red jacket, a rich red and a wonderful fuzzy in both directions. (You know how sometimes you stroke a fuzzy piece of clothing one way and it feels good but the other way it feels weird and unpleasant?) Anyway, this one's lovely fuzzy all over, inside and out. I wear it in the house when I'm cold but don't want to get my robe out.
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| Sunday afternoon and the snoozing is easy (That's me in the red fuzzy.) |
So I'm wearing my red fuzzy jacket all zipped up, and the rest of me is under the afgan (which is occurs to me my sister-in-law also gave me!). Apricot looked over and saw me, and I swear his face lit up like "OOOH!" and he raced over and jumped into my lap, where he normally has to be coaxed and persuaded to be. And he buried his face in my tummy and started kneading heavily and happily.
I said, mildly bemused, (if you like this) "you're really going to like winter." (I didn't actually say the "if you like this" part; I sometimes have a tendency to start talking vocally in the middle of a thought rather than the beginning of one!)
Once he got the whole kneading fuzzy me out of his system, then he curled up in the tiny spot next to me and slept for a while. I'm still used to how Pippin would sleep for hours on me, so it always seems too short when Apricot wakes up and leaves after ten or fifteen minutes. I try to enjoy it while it lasts. And I bet as he grows older he'll want to sleep longer at a stretch.
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